Happiness
by death gaidin
Summary: Eliot is not a happy man. Ever wonder why?


This is my first fanfiction, though I have been writing for quite some time. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

And of course I don't own Eliot Spencer or any creative properties from the show Leverage.

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Eliot is not a happy man.

Sure, he finds tranquility, and even peace, in certain situations – cooking, playing his guitar, working with horses – but that doesn't mean that he is truly happy. No one who has lived the life that he has can ever truly be happy.

That is something that the others on the team can't wrap their minds around when they attempt to discover the man cloaked beneath the veil of the mysterious retrieval expert. After all, the team sees him as a bad ass fighter who surprises them with hidden skills around every turn. But they never stop to consider how those skills were attained.

Hardison doesn't want to know. He knows in the back of his mind that Eliot is a killer, and that his criminal career has been filled with far more violence and pain than he can even conceive playing world of Warcraft. However, he refuses to attempt to dwell on what Eliot has done in his past. Because when it all comes down to it, Hardison is afraid of Eliot.

Parker doesn't think about the mystery behind Eliot because that simply isn't how Parker thinks. She likes continually being surprised by Eliot because it keeps her on her toes and prevents things from becoming too dull, too routine. Parker likes to guess what hidden skill he will reveal next to the team. But she never attempts to figure out where those skills came from. After all, she doesn't like to dwell on the past – hers or others. She knows that the only thing the past holds is pain.

Sophie doesn't understand Eliot, though that hasn't stopped her from allowing her fantasy to run wild in an attempt to figure him out. It is her job to read people, though Eliot is one of the few people that she can't completely figure out. The little she knows of his past tells her that he keeps a lot of pain buried beneath his Southern charm and rough, cowboy demeanor. What she doesn't know is that he can be an even better actress than she is. He acts like the world hasn't broken and forged him back together dozens of times. He acts like he doesn't care.

Then there is Nate. Out of all of them Nate knows the most about his past. He knows that it took Eliot over three months to escape from that prison camp in Croatia. He knows that he has always worked alone – no matter how impossible or dangerous the job seemed. And he knows that the one IYS agent that caught Eliot in Budapest, a seasoned veteran of dealing with dangerous criminals, retired immediately after handing Eliot over to the authorities, claiming that he had never worked a case that dealt so closely with the uncensored cruelty of the real world. Eliot Spencer has always been more of a legend in the retrieval business than an actual human being. The Yakuza still call him the Angel of Death in Tokyo, though only Eliot and the Yakuza know why.

Nate doesn't try to understand why Eliot isn't happy or what horrors remain hidden behind Eliot's cold, calculating eyes – he only has enough scotch to blur out one painful set of memories.

In the end the rest of the team will never truly be able to understand Eliot. He knows that. Even as he discusses football stats while watching the game with Nate and Hardison, or assists Sophie in attempting to teach Parker how to act around normal people, he knows that there is a part of his life that he will never be able to share with the rest of the team. The team will either reject him for the things that he has done – things that may seem inhuman to the comforted lives that most of them have seen, or they will pity him for what he has endured. Eliot can take rejection, he has dealt with the idea that he is alone in the world for most of his life. What he couldn't handle is the thought of the others looking at him with pity. He would rather have them hate him then try to understand him. Because if the rest of the team knew the scars that Eliot carried on both his body and his soul, then they would understand how truly terrible the world can be.

And Eliot wants to protect them from that. He wants the team to be happy. That's why he helps Sophie as she attempts to find a way to lesson Nate's degenerate drinking. Why he continues discreetly to push Hardison and Parker together.

He protects their happiness.

Because he has none of his own.


End file.
